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Take that
As the macrobert prepares to host four-day multi-arts
festival THAT, filmmaker and curator Mark Cousins reveals the inspiration behind his selection of films for the event
Y ou fall in love with movies more than once. At the age of 18, I saw Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth at the macrobert centre in Stirling, where I was a student, and fell head over heels. It was about a Chinese girl longing to be someone else. Last month, when the macrobert asked me to guest curate a part of their THAT Festival, I immediately thought that my theme should be that longing.
I’d been thinking about it for months, to be honest. I’d just made a film in Mexico about Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s idea of ecstasis, getting out of your stasis, losing yourself. Ecstasis for me is everywhere, in the music of Bowie, the styling of Madonna, the writing of Ovid and Virginia Woolf, the endorphins of athletes, the films of Antonioni and Jodorowsky. It’s why I dance, travel, booze and go to gigs. It’s what The List magazine is about. So I’ve chosen some films about the rapture of self-loss – impolite, dreamy, Dionysian films.
When we were students, the macbob seemed a bit foostie (it’s not now), so the films will put a rocket up the bum of foostieness. And other artists are doing work on the theme – theatre, installations, parties. And people are invited to submit short films about their own idea of self-loss. The macbob’ll show my new film What is this Film Called Love?, in which I chat to Eisenstein about ecstasis, and they’ll also show my 15-hour movie The Story of Film, treated in a radically new way, with music by Clint Mansell.
You are cordially invited to go along, dress up,
explore, and be what people think you aren’t.
Ecstasis is on Sat 6 Oct, 2–8pm, macrobert, Stirling. Other highlights of the programme, running between Fri 5–Mon 8 Oct, include Theatre Uncut and We Were Promised Jetpacks over the weekend. See macrobert. org/thatfest for full programme.
ReviewofReviews WHAT WE SAID:
‘A variable beast [it] initially impresses with its audacious cinematography. However most of the film relies on dialogue-heavy sequences that aren’t quite witty or insightful enough to keep up the momentum.’ THE LIST WHAT THEY SAID: ‘It is outstandingly watchable, superbly and casually pessimistic, a world of slot- mouthed professional and semi-professional criminals always complaining about cleaning up the mess made
KILLING ME SOFTLY ON GENERAL RELEASE
21 SEP
by other screwups.’ THE GUARDIAN
‘You’d be right to expect Oz writer/director Andrew Dominik and producer/star Brad Pitt to unfurl another great US epic. But weirdly, crime drama Killing Them Softly turns out to be a sawn- off oddity.’ TOTAL FILM ‘This is a cracking piece of storytelling, with a restrained balance of laidback chat and canny visual outbursts, and a delicious thread of gallows humour running through it.’ TIME OUT
Spotlight on CHRISTOPHER HAMPSON
We get the lowdown on Scottish Ballet’s new hotly- anticipated artistic director • Manchester-born Hampson graduated from the Royal Ballet School in 1992 and joined English National Ballet, where he danced as a soloist until 1999 before leaving to concentrate full-time on choreography. • He premiered his first full- length work, A Christmas Carol, at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2000, and went on to win the 2002 Barclays Theatre Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance and the 2002 Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Best Classical Choreography for his Double Concerto with English National Ballet. In 2003, he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Production for his Romeo and Juliet with Royal New Zealand Ballet. • Hampson’s a founding member of the International Ballet Masterclasses in Prague (and still guest teaches there every year), is mentor for young choreographers at the Royal Ballet as part of their First Drafts programme and is judge for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Choreography Award. • His interests include marathon running and studying for a degree in Humanities (French and Classical Studies). • Hampson’s mum is from Gourock and he spent many school holidays here visiting his grandparents. • He likes to knit — and is looking forward to some sneaky yarn shopping on tour. • Hampson’s ideal dinner guests are Tosca, not the opera heroine, but his first dog; Peter Darrell; Marcus Tullius Cicero; Mary Beard and Quentin Crisp for the one-liners over coffee and After Eights.
8 THE LIST 20 Sep–18 Oct 2012